Alexandra Teague & Rachel Richardson in Conversation with Elaina Ellis

Join us in the Readings Gallery to celebrate Poetry Month with poets Alexandra Teague and Rachel Richardson as they dive into the crux of their poetry! Local publisher and cofounder at Generous Press, Elaina Ellis, will be joining the authors for the evening.

In poems that bring together traditional American patriotic songs and current American horrors, Alexandra Teague takes on the too-muchness of contemporary society with humor, conscience, and the occasional fiddle duel. [ominous music intensifying] is a reckoning with sexism and dental trauma, Mitch McConnell and UFOs, Yeats' Rough Beast and sad clown paintings—and with some of the most urgent crises of our time: gun violence, pandemics, and climate change.

How should we raise our children in, and for, a world that is burning? Rachel Richardson's third collection, Smother, interrogates this impossible question. But these are not poems of giving up. The poems in Smother gather accomplices, remember the dead, keep watch at the firebreaks, and plant new trees on the burn scars. These poems sing their song of resistance made from the music that is available to us now.

Alexandra Teague is most recently the author of [ominous music intensifying] (Persea 2024) and Spinning Tea Cups: A Mythical American Memoir (Oregon State University Press 2023). She is previously the author of three books of poetry and a novel, as well as co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A former Stegner Fellow and NEA recipient, she is a professor at University of Idaho, where she co-directs the MFA program.
Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother (Norton, 2025) and two previous poetry collections. She is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT and a former Stegner and NEA Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Resident through the Confluence Lab, and has now completed FFT2 wildland firefighter training. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Elaina Ellis (she/her) is publisher and cofounder at Generous Press. She owns and operates A Trusted Reader, providing literary book editing services for brilliant writers of all stripes. For ten years she worked at the Pulitzer Prize-winning publishing house Copper Canyon Press where she served as editor. She is the author of Write About an Empty Birdcage, and has received support from Artist Trust, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, Jack Straw, Tent, 4Culture, and Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

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